


Caged Sunlight

by motsureru



Series: Victims of Circumstance [21]
Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-10
Updated: 2008-05-10
Packaged: 2017-11-11 18:18:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/481455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/motsureru/pseuds/motsureru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a bonus drabble I included in the original doc uploads of my Broken Glass/Any Other Night/Victims of Circumstance three-series epic. It's a drabble from the perspective of Sebastian Godard and should be read AFTER completing all three series (otherwise you will give yourself some major spoilers!).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caged Sunlight

Anticipation.            

            It was the word that captured his mindset best each time Mohinder Suresh was due to enter their laboratory. Anticipation of warm greetings, anticipation of hearty laughter, anticipation of blind dedication…

            But it was not blind enough.

            Again and again Sebastian saw the smile on the man’s face and the tenacity in his eyes. Again and again he realized that the Company was completely wrong; they would never capture this one. They would never enslave him with their ideals nor bend him to their will without a battle that was both epic and just.

            Still, there was an anticipation nonetheless. Some vague sense of excitement entered Sebastian Godard- no, Sebastian Barret- every time that Mohinder’s optimistic smile shone a beacon of naiveté into his dim little world. And it was, indeed, a very dark place.

            The research was false. Every day a fabrication of progress and setbacks were the endless cycle of deception he had been lead to leave. Every night the same dull room met Sebastian at the end of it, where he could sit in a chair, not unlike the one in his cell in New York, and let his over-stimulated mind rest in at least one of its locations. Once more, life outside of the dark room was as meaningless as inside of the dark room. They were one and the same.

            Envy.

            Sebastian felt it every day, the subtle reminder that he was alive. Surely, it seemed, every person in the world was dissatisfied in some manner with his or her life. That Sebastian should be dissatisfied with each and every one of his own reminded him that he was one of them, even when he felt that he was not. Even when he knew each empty shell and empty life to be a desperate attempt at salvaging what the Company had told him all those years ago was a life not worth living. Now, no matter how many he lived, the envy that he felt for the fact that not a single one was _truly_ real allowed Sebastian to draw the line between his realities of fiction and reality itself.

            He despised that line with every ounce of strength that clung to it.

            As it was, he had spent years training- years sounded like a misnomer, but it had been two or three, hadn’t it? Nevertheless, it had been years that he spent in intensive study to be Sebastian Godard. He had lived him, breathed him, made him a part of himself that was there, and yet was not. Barret was too unstable, too unreliable, and too valuable to send out. He was a commodity to protect and preserve at all costs. He could never be real.

            And yet, to breathe in the air as Sebastian Godard and look upon Mohinder with his untrue eyes made a part of the man scream inside his shell with the ferocity of a caged animal, tearing at the farce of Godard from the inside out, but never quite reaching the surface. He raged with jealousy that Mohinder had chosen his paths so far from the Company, that he could wear his true self upon that smiling face, and take life to his breast knowing that it was genuine and solid in his grasp.

            Fiction.

            Barret’s world was a series of fictitious tales woven together by a common thread of Sebastian. He thought, at times, that it was not altogether unpleasant to be oneself, but not, dozens of times over. To live one’s life and then another and another with infinite possibilities ahead and behind, to be capable of starting over again at the slightest mistake. And yet, so… inconclusive.

            To feel lust for a life… an authentic life… a normal life… with all the precious satisfactions it entailed… Again, he was at once aligned with every human being and still forever a world apart. He would never have these things. He wanted to show the world Sebastian Barret, some day. To step out onto a street and feel more than the mental recognition that there was sun on one of his artificial faces somewhere in a distant land.

            It would surely be a magnificent thing to see an anomaly, to see Sebastian Barret as the one to claw his way from Sebastian Godard’s body; to see this creature birth the other, viciously erupting from split skin and open organs as though the first body were the Earth itself and the second a sapling sloughing off the shell and mud to bask in the sunlight.

            Ah, but even Sebastian Barret was meant to one day feel the sun upon his flesh again, wasn’t he? Godard was merely birthed from darkness and bitter silence; his body could never know the true joy of the sun. Godard was only the top of the tree that stretched for sunlight in the earth’s place, while ironically blocking it from the view below. As a whole, Barret was, in his own way, as intricate as the world itself, all earth and trees alike. With each new body, his world expanded. One brilliant mind scattered into so many lesser beings- who could imagine the possibilities if there was only one vessel? Surely that was what the Company feared most: they feared the day his world became too powerful for theirs.

            But even if Sebastian knew this power, even if he knew this strength, in the end it was useless. His anticipation, his envy, his fiction, they had all dug too deep a grave in the Earth for him to climb out from once again. The harshness of his words had never been a Company wish, but his own desperation and futility seeping through, burying him with the revenge of others. Sebastian Barret was the Earth, after all, and it was to him which all Sebastians would return.

            Even as he plead in his own pathetic way for his much despised, precious life, Sebastian had stared up into Sylar’s dark eyes and felt the most bittersweet sense of relief. From darkness he had been born so many times, and now, to the fiery light of this man’s vengeful hand, he would be born for a final time. The tears of elation fell away with searing, melting skin, and disappeared, unknown, into oblivion.

            Goodbye, Sebastian.

            How nice to finally see the sun. 


End file.
